- US sub-contractors are importing cheap migrant labour
from south Asia to Iraq, despite high local unemployment and complaints
from Iraqi contractors that they are being overlooked by the US-led administration
in Baghdad.
-
- US officials in the Iraqi capital say that six months
into their occupation of Iraq, security conditions have forced companies
to turn to south Asian labour to implement contracts, from prison-building
to catering for US troops.
-
- Recent weeks have seen unrest in several major cities,
including the capital Baghdad, amid rising anger at Iraq's high unemployment
rate.
-
- "We don't want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to
protect ourselves," says Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority's procurement office. "From a force protection
standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a bad guy influence."
-
- US troops and some companies under contract to the US
government nevertheless seem prepared to take the "risk".
-
- Iraqis form the bulk of the workforce for reconstructing
Iraq's prisons. General Janis Karpinski, who is overseeing the prison programme,
says she has had "no single security incident" involving Iraqi
contractors.
-
- "You find other [non-Iraq] nationalities in out-of-the-way
corners taking 15 minute naps," she says. "Iraqis see work as
a way of getting the country on its feet."
-
- Bechtel, which is handling a $680m (Ä577m, £408m)
reconstruction programme for USAid, has meanwhile held open days for Iraqi
contractors and intends to spend $215m of $300m on Iraqi sub-contracts.
-
- "If the work can be done by an Iraqi firm at a competitive
price that's who's going to do it," says Francis Caravan, Bechtel
spokesman in Baghdad.
-
- But a number of businesses based in Saudi Arabia and
other Gulf states that have contracts to supply the US army are wary of
employing indigenous labour.
-
- "Iraqis are a security threat," says a Pakistani
manager in Baghdad for the Tamimi Company, based in the Saudi city of Dammam,
which is contracted to cater for 60,000 soldiers in Iraq. "We cannot
depend on them."
-
- The company, which has 12 years' experience feeding US
troops in the Gulf, employs 1,800 Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and
Nepalese in its kitchens. It uses only a few dozen Iraqis for cleaning.
-
- In the dusty backyard of the US administrators' Baghdad
palace, south Asians, housed 12 to a Saudi-made temporary cabin, organise
180,000 meals a day for US troops and administrators.
-
- A Tamimi manager says the company pays an average salary
of one Saudi riyal ($3) a day and grants leave once every two years. The
contracts are awarded by Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of
Halliburton, which in 2001 won its second Logistics Civil Augmentation
Program, or Logcap, contract to sub-contract the supply of US military
provisions. The Logcap is open-ended and its Iraqi share is worth "in
excess of $2bn", according to officials of the Defence Contract Management
Agency in Baghdad.
-
- "The US military have never outsourced resources
on this scale," says the DCMA's Colonel Damon Walsh. "If it weren't
for this service support we would have needed at least 20,000 more troops."
KBR officials in Baghdad declined to provide details of their employment
policy in Iraq, or the size of their Asian workforce.
-
- However, Patrice Mingo, a KBR spokesman in Houston, says:
"We buy as much as can locally and if we are unable to buy locally
we go the Middle East. We look at Iraqis first, but we don't track our
employees by ethnicity."
-
- The potential for ill-feeling nevertheless remains. "US
contractors are importing labour and expatriating the benefits," says
Hakim Awad, an Iraqi construction manager who queues for contracts outside
Baghdad Airport every day. "Where's the benefit accruing to Iraq?"
-
- Under a new Iraqi investment law, foreigners can own
companies in full and export all the profits. US officials say they encourage
firms to employ Iraqis but do not stipulate a minimum percentage for Iraqi
employees.
-
- The recourse to an Urdu-and Bengali-speaking workforce
has historical echoes for Iraqis, who recall the south Asian workers the
India Office imported to maintain the British army following their invasion
of Iraq during the first world war.
-
- Some also fear the replication of labour patterns from
Gulf states, whose economies are dependent on Arab and Asian migrants.
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- © Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2003.
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- http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory
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